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Technology Square, nicknamed Tech Square, is a commercial office building complex in the Kendall Square neighborhood of Cambridge, Massachusetts, immediately adjacent to the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which is one of the most prestigious colleges in the world.
Tech Square was jointly developed by Cabot, Cabot & Forbes (CCF) and MIT on a 14-acre (5.7 ha) site which had previously housed a tenement (demolished in 1957) and a Lever Brothers soap factory (closed in 1959). The architects were Eduardo Catalano and Pietro Belluschi. The original architectural style was Brutalist (especially the central building), with a large open plaza paved with concrete and featuring wide shallow stepped levels.
The first building (545) opened in 1963, the second (575) in 1964. Two more buildings were erected in 1966 and 1967, [1] forming a U facing Main Street made up of three nine-story buildings, and a three-story building in the middle.
In the 1970s, Draper Laboratory was built north of the original buildings, in the lot between them and Broadway, and was numbered 555.
Polaroid had its corporate headquarters at 549 Tech Square, the three-story building (known as the 'Block House') in the center of the courtyard, from 1966-1998. [2] In 1999-2002, the small building was demolished [3] and an additional four buildings were added as infill to the former open plaza. All the older buildings were reworked into a more-contemporary style, and the combined complex was renumbered as 100–700. [4] [ failed verification ] The comprehensive renovation and expansion was designed by Perkins & Will. [5]
The original complex had no street-level storefronts, though it did house a small branch bank. The newer buildings add multiple storefronts with restaurants and retail properties aligned along the edge of the public sidewalk, rather than set back from the property lines as in its original conception.
MIT sold its interest in Tech Square in 1973-74 to CCF. CCF later went into bankruptcy, and the complex was successively owned by Mitsubishi Bank, the Prudential Life Insurance Company, and Beacon Capital Partners, until it was repurchased by MIT in 2001. [1] Alexandria Real Estate Equities bought the complex for $600m in 2006, [6] and it is now officially called Alexandria Technology Square on some documentation, although the original name is still used almost exclusively.
MIT's Project MAC (1963-2004) and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (1970-2004) occupied adjacent spaces at 545 Technology Square prior to their merger; the MIT building number assigned was NE43. [7] Originally, the MIT labs occupied the 8th and 9th floors, but eventually they expanded to occupy the entire building. [7] In 2004, the labs vacated Tech Square to move into their new expanded facilities in the MIT Stata Center on the main campus. [7] The vacated building was completely overhauled and redesignated as 200 Technology Square. [7]
Many other companies and organizations have had offices in Tech Square, including Polaroid, IBM's Cambridge Scientific Center, General Electric's and then Honeywell's Cambridge Information Systems Laboratory, NASA's Electronics Research Center, Keydata Corporation, the National Bureau of Economic Research, Computer Corporation of America, Draper Laboratory, Forrester Research, the World Wide Web Consortium, the Free Software Foundation, and Akamai.
The Central Intelligence Agency had a small office in Tech Square. MIT hackers placed a sign nearby, featuring the word "Intelligence". Below were the words "Central" and "Artificial", with arrows pointing in opposite directions. [7]
Hackers tapped into the elevator controls to allow their computers to summon the elevator directly to the ninth floor. [7]
Among the technologies developed at Technology Square are the Multics, CP/CMS, and ITS operating systems, the Maclisp, Logo, MDL, and Scheme programming languages, the Macsyma computer algebra system, the Emacs editor, the Polaroid SX-70 camera (partly), [8] the RSA cryptosystem (partly), the Zork computer game, the Model 204 database management system, the Lisp Machine, the Curl web programming language, and the Akamai content delivery network.
Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, in the United States. It is a major suburb in the Greater Boston metropolitan area, located directly across the Charles River from Boston. The city's population as of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the largest city in the county, the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston, Worcester, and Springfield, and ninth most populous city in New England. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, which was an important center of the Puritan theology that was embraced by the town's founders.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and science.
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The Technion – Israel Institute of Technology is a public research university located in Haifa, Israel. Established in 1912 under the dominion of the Ottoman Empire, the Technion is the oldest university in the country. The Technion is ranked as one of the top universities in both Israel and the Middle East, and in the world's top 100 universities in the 2022 Academic Ranking of World Universities.
The Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) is a student organization at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Historically it has been a wellspring of hacker culture and the oldest such hacking group in North America. Formed in 1946, its HO scale layout specializes in automated operation of model trains.
Kendall Square is a neighborhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The square itself at the intersection of Main Street and Broadway. It also refers to the broad business district east of Portland Street, northwest of the Charles River, north of MIT and south of Binney Street. Kendall Square has been called "the most innovative square mile on the planet", in reference to the high concentration of entrepreneurial start-ups and quality of innovation which have emerged in the vicinity of the square since 2010.
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Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is a research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Housed within the Ray and Maria Stata Center, CSAIL is the largest on-campus laboratory as measured by research scope and membership. It is part of the Schwarzman College of Computing but is also overseen by the MIT Vice President of Research.
Draper Laboratory is an American non-profit research and development organization, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts; its official name is The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Inc. The laboratory specializes in the design, development, and deployment of advanced technology solutions to problems in national security, space exploration, health care and energy.
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The IBM Cambridge Scientific Center was a company research laboratory established in February 1964 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Situated at 545 Technology Square, in the same building as MIT's Project MAC, it was later renamed the IBM Scientific Center. It is most notable for creating the CP-40 and the control program portions of CP/CMS, a virtual machine operating system developed for the IBM System/360-67.
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The MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing is a college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Announced in 2018 to address the growing applications of computing technology, the college is an Institute-wide academic unit that works alongside MIT's five Schools of Architecture and Planning, Engineering, Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, Science, and Management. The college emphasizes artificial intelligence research, interdisciplinary applications of computing, and social and ethical responsibilities of computing. It aims to be an interdisciplinary hub for work in artificial intelligence, computer science, data science, and related fields. Its creation was the first significant change to MIT's academic structure since the early 1950s.